I’m sharing my insights on how practitioners across different design domains can benefit from applying holistic perspective.
Photo by Alexander Pryshyvalka (Instagram)
We live in the world that can be seen as a multitude of nested systems in constant interaction, with new properties emerging over time. Or, as English poet T. E. Hulme puts it, as a “concrete flux of interpenetrating intensities”. Kees Dorst describes the current state of things as hyperconnectivity: “Each of us has become newly connected to innumerable other people. By networking our society, we have inadvertently networked our problems, too. <…> The enclosed miniworlds of our societies, economies, and cultures have been replaced by a tangle of relationships within complex and overlapping networks, where problems cannot be simplified by being split up (the network of relationships is too strong) and power does not rest in one place any more.” Likewise, in the natural environment everything is connected to everything else, regardless of whether we recognise it or not. In case we do not recognise this interconnectedness, we are likely to fail seeing “forest for the trees”. If so, we are barely able to recognise those underpinning larger issues and challenges that arise from interdependency inside and between complex systems. And on the contrary, if we are able to acknowledge complexity we are part of, it’s the first step towards navigating through it.
Given these interconnectedness and non-linear causalities in complex systems, it’s vital to bear in mind that products or services we design may lead to unpredictable and long-lasting effects. Since every one of us participates in numerous activities that belong to social, economic, and ecological realms, we are all parts of multiple systems and everything we create inevitably becomes a part of multiple systems too. 
To be able to navigate this complexity, I consider it to be important to challenge the inappropriate and, in a way, obsolete patterns of thought belonging to fragmented, mechanistic, and purely rational mindset. In particular, it can be helpful and beneficial to adopt the following viewpoints:
Consider the nature of the problems: we live in the complex environment which implies specific kind of challenges — open, complex, dynamic, and networked,Apply profound inquiry: complex systems encompass different and interdependent levels of inquiry — individual, social, economic, and ecological, unlikeEmbrace holistic worldview: the world as a multitude of complex systems is characterised by nestedness, interconnectedness, emergence, and non-linear causalities,Be mindful about problem solving: one-off solutions do not work in a complex environment; instead, it is interventions that are able to create a momentum for a situation to head towards its better state.
As a methodology that allows tackling complexity, there emerges Systemic Design. What I’d like to ponder around in this text is how designers from different domains can benefit from systemic design. I’ll elaborate further on each point from the list above. But before this I’d like to outline what systemic design is: it’s an interdiscipline that joins systems thinking to design methodology in order to tackle complex problems while fostering holistic, sustainable, and regenerative outcomes. What distinguishes systemic design from other design domains is scale and complexity; the following figure illustrates this.
Design domains (Jones and van Patter, 2009)
These design domains are not isolated, but rather they are highly interconnected, and systemic design as a broader approach integrates knowledge across all of them.
For more details on systemic design I can recommend Peter Jones’ paper “Systemic Design Principles for Complex Social Systems” as a starting point. Also, you may want to check the Systemic Design Association site.
The nature of today’s problems
Systemic design argues that global challenges, that we as humanity are facing today, have to do with complex systems. Together with that, according to the idea of Antropocene, all systems can be considered as deeply influenced by human activity. Although one of the system’s characteristics is its emergent behaviour, it is us who are also responsible for creating complexity — through technological, economic, and organisational networks — that we are trying to tackle.
In his seminal book “Frame innovation”, Kees Dorst describes today’s challenges as open, complex, dynamic, and networked:
Being open, problems have no boundaries. The system border is blurry and it’s not clear what can be safely excluded from the problem situation and considered as a context; in other words, “problem and context seem to merge”.Being complex, problems have multiple elements and relationships. These multiple connections create an intertwined system making the problem situation hard to be split into chunks. It means that “one small local decision can lead to lots of repercussions and chain effects in other seemingly unrelated areas.”Being dynamic, problems change over time. Essentially, this dynamism has to do with one of the system properties — emergence — which stems from constant interactions between elements within a system and with the environment. As a result, a dynamic problem situation is characterised by the emerging of new elements as well as arising and changing of relationships.Being networked, problems span across organisations. “Problems are so intimately related to each other (and there are so many interdependencies) that they become impossible to isolate.” In other words, today’s challenges are interconnected; seemingly disparate domains might influence each other unpredictably in terms of effect and scale.
These aspects are essential for understanding the nature of today’s problems. However, the nature of conventional problem solving does not allow to tackle such problems adequately, “because most of our conventional strategies were conceived to work in a reasonably isolated, static, and hierarchically ordered ‘miniworld’.” (Dorst) In reality, there’s no way to “freeze the world”, simplify the problem situation, apply one-off solution, and switch to another problem.
Profound multylayer inquiry
One of the tools in systemic design methodology is Causal Layered Analysis (CLA).
https://medium.com/media/c70868d43c588e40312ca971ecae2515/href
On the one hand, CLA is a framework used for guiding the research of a complex problem; on the other hand, it provides a space for creating visions of an alternative future. As a model, CLA consists of four levels of increasing depth:
Litany — observable events and trends,Structures & systems — causes underlying observable events and trends,Worldview & values — deeper paradigms that underpin structures and systems as well as enable behaviours,Myth — metaphors or social narratives that reflect collective unconsciousness and reveal emotional perspective.
Considering these four levels during the research stage is a really powerful way to include different sources of knowledge, as Inayatullah describes them: public discourse (Litany level), science (Structures & systems level), discourse analysis (Worldview & values level), art & culture (Myth level). What is the most captivating to me is this underlying level of myth/metaphor or “the civilizational level of identity” as Inayatullah calls it. “These are the deep stories, the collective archetypes — the unconscious and often emotive dimensions of the problem or the paradox. <…> This is the root level of questioning.” (Inayatullah) While the top three levels can be considered as rational ones, the level of myth/metaphor stems from emotional, somatic, and unconscious perception. This level also reveals something foundational for a given society or a culture that everyone presupposes without even articulating it.
This framework is applicable during both analysis and synthesis stages of a design process. Once the deepest level of inquiry — myth/metaphor — is reached, deconstruction of conventional metaphor and articulation of an alternative one allows an alternative future to be envisioned. This way, the subsequent overhead levels — Worldview & values, Structures & systems, and Litany — get firmly grounded in and underpinned by this alternative metaphor.
Holistic worldview
In the CLA model mentioned above, one of the layers is called Worldviews. It has to do with the worldviews, believes, and paradigms that support and legitimise the overhead levels — existing structures and observable issues. “At this stage, one can explore how different discourses (the economic, the religious, and the cultural, for example) do more than cause or mediate the issue but constitute it. It investigates how the discourse we use to understand is complicit in our framing of the issue.” (Inayatullah)
Worldviews can be considered as both (1) lenses through which one perceives the world and (2) particular ways to interpret it. The thing with these lenses is that one is not aware that one ‘wears’ them until somebody points it out. This is one of the reasons why worldviews are incredibly powerful — they implicitly influence how problems are defined and approached.
Systemic Design toolkit provides a powerful technique called Paradoxing that fosters a holistic perspective. Dealing with a complex problem implies considering multiple perspectives across different levels — individual, social, economic, and ecological. It could be tempting and easy to simplify and stick to one perspective while ignoring the others — paradoxical, opposite and conflicting ones. This is where Paradoxing can help to reveal where tension in a system stems from. Although a paradox might seem irreconcilable, both its polarities are valid at the same time, as Yin and Yang.
For the sake of practical application, there exists a set of cards each of which presents an “interdependent pair”, as Johnson calls it.
A paradox card (Namahn)
I find Paradoxing to be a mighty technique since it allows to explore and understand a situation from numerous — and contradictory — perspectives in order to embrace different facets of reality. Basically, Paradoxing suggests “AND thinking instead of OR thinking” (Van Ael) because a real system is interconnected — it’s impossible to ignore contradictions and tensions that constitute paradoxes. At the end of the day, both halves of the whole are true and exist and have to be satisfied simultaneously. In other words, the whole can be perceived as a flux of interdependent pairs.
Today’s complex problems have not been planned deliberately, rather, they have been emerging as consequences of collective actions rooted in social paradigms and individual worldviews & values. “Differentiation has produced science, technology, and the unprecedented power of mankind to build up and to destroy its environment. But the complexity consists of integration as well as differentiation. The task of the next decades and centuries is to realize this underdeveloped component of the mind. Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with entities around us without losing our hard won individuality.” (Csikszentmihalyi) What is topical today is fostering of a larger cultural paradigm shift away from the “lens of separation”, in other words, from the fragmented to holistic worldview. The ‘lens of separation’ renders such picture of reality where everything is perceived as if being disconnected and disparate. Such a worldview signifies lack of mindful connection with one’s authentic inner life, with communities, and with the environment; humans seem to be separate and superior to nature, some people seem to be superior to others, the rational seems to be superior to the somatic. “The principle of holism argues that there are no privileged parts, no primary causes, no blueprints which define the emergent order.” (Reason, Goodwin) Seeing through such holistic lens reveals the world in its complexity — as multitudes of nested systems encompassing multitudes of parts in ongoing interactions that generate emergent outcomes. Reality lively unfolds through interconnectedness, interdependency, and emergence regardless of human ability (or disability) to acknowledge it, and it’s our responsibility to reunite us with the world.
Problem solving and illusion of control
In her influential text “Leverage points” Donella Meadows suggested a framework for intervention strategy. A leverage point is an aspect where high-impact system intervention can be achieved. There are 12 types of leverage points with different scale of effectiveness an intervention can produce. Another Meadows’ text — more evocative one — is floating around “systems wisdom” or the idea of “dancing with systems” which in a way transcends the notion of leverage points.
What is essential to understand is that a system change stems from qualitative shifts rather than from quantitative ones. Currently, most of us strongly believe in numbers and consider something that can be measured as more important than what can’t be measured. However, Meadows invites to pay attention to what is really important, not just quantifiable: “No one can precisely define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can precisely define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.”
One more thing that Meadows points out is that the mindset of the industrial world is blinded by the illusion of control over a complex system: “We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect.” Although there are 12 different types of leverage points available, it does not mean that they extend human possibility for establishing control over complex environment. Predictions and one-off solutions are not applicable to non-liner, self-organising, feedback systems. However, even though systems can not be controlled, they can be designed and redesigned; although future can not be fully predicted, it can be envisioned and its better state can be fostered and approached through “different sort of ‘doing’”.
Instead of problem solving as a one-off precedent, systems require continued and iterative interventions. This is embracing of other form of engagement with reality which is mindful and wise participation in relationships. Control is based on separation and domination, while participation is rooted in interconnectedness and collaboration. Participation is an ongoing process which opens up a space to “listen to the wisdom of the system” (Meadows), contemplate what is constantly emerging in it, experiment, learn from trial & error, and, eventually, listen again. I can compare such different sort of doing to playing improvised music in contrast to playing according to the scores.
All in all
Mindset of the industrial world has produced specific cultural paradigms — economic growth, competition, consumerism, and others — which have both positive and negative consequences. Reductionist approach often tries to find simple, cheap, and one-off solutions which, eventually, yield new wave of unpredicted challenges. So, the problem is in our ways of doing and solving problems. The world is beautiful in its complexity, though, meaning that everything is interconnected and interdependent. Complexity cannot be ignored, simplified, or controlled. The ability to navigate complexity demands “different sort of ‘doing’” which is rooted in a shift from the fragmented to holistic worldview. Instead of harnessing complexity, what one can do is listen to its wisdom, experiment, learn from errors, and start over. On a level of practice, one way to approach this is proposed by systemic design which synergates or couples systems thinking and design methodology.
One of the essential things suggested by systemic design is a shift in one’s worldview from a reductionist and fragmented worldview towards a holistic one. Based on systems thinking, I reckon that one’s individual influence is broader than we might think. We are all participating in various systems. Because of this, (1) systems change is unattainable without inner personal transformation, and (2) practitioners from different design domains can both initiate and benefit from this transformation. Systems change comes from within meaning that an individual and planetary wellbeing is not in opposition, but rather they constitute an interdependent pair. What is needed now is actions on different levels of practice considering larger holistic perspective.
Thanks for reading!
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How systemic design can add to other design domains was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
